Last month we took a look at NVIDIA's new midrange graphics offerings, the GeForce 8500/8600 cards. With 8800 series cards still costing well over $200, many users were hopeful that the new midrange products would hearken back to the days of the GeForce 6600 GT. The new cards offer decent performance and they definitely have some interesting new features, but in terms of providing a performance leap over the previous generation midrange hardware they seem to fall a bit short. That may change once we begin to see some DirectX 10 games on the market, but the reception so far has been generally ambivalent.

The GeForce 8M Series more or less follows in the footsteps of the desktop G84/G86 products. Here's a quick look at the specifications of the latest mobile NVIDIA hardware.

GeForce 8M Series Specifications

8400M G

8400M GS

8400M GT

8600M GS

8600M GT

Segment

Mainstream

Mainstream

Mainstream

Performance

Performance

Stream Processors

8

16

16

16

32

Core Clock

400 MHz

400 MHz

450 MHz

600 MHz

475 MHz

Shader Clock

800 MHz

800 MHz

900 MHz

1200 MHz

950 MHz

DDR RAM Clock

1200 MHz

1200 MHz

1200 MHz

1400 MHz

1400 MHz

Maximum RAM

256MB

256MB

512MB

512MB

512MB

RAM Interface

64-bit

64-bit

128-bit

128-bit

128-bit

RAM Bandwidth

9.6 GB/s

9.6 GB/s

19.2 GB/s

22.4 GB/s

22.4 GB/s

Texture Fill Rate

3.2 GT

3.2 GT

3.6 GT

4.8 GT

7.6 GT

Similar to previous mobile graphics solutions, the feature set is nearly identical to the desktop offerings but with slightly different clock speeds. Power requirements are a far larger consideration, so for now we don't have any equivalent of the desktop GeForce 8600 GTS, and the 8600M GT has a core clock speed that's quite a bit lower than the desktop 8600 GT. Still, the new chips should provide more performance than previous generation mobile hardware, and there are other benefits.

Besides the addition of DirectX 10 support, NVIDIA has overhauled their video processing engine. We discussed this in the desktop G84 article, but the short story is that H.264 decoding is now handled completely by the GeForce 8M processors. We actually think the feature is quite a bit more important in the notebook market, simply because we feel more people are likely to use portable computers to watch movies than regular desktop computers. Our reasoning is simple.

Most houses have a set-top DVD player that comes with a remote and probably costs less than $100, and adoption rates of Blu-ray and HD-DVD in the computer market have been relatively slow. The most likely owners of next-generation HD formats are the people that went out and bought PlayStation 3 consoles. On the other hand, anyone that owns a notebook computer and travels on a regular basis has probably watched a DVD at some point or another. Blu-ray and HD-DVD adoption is still in its infancy on laptops, but that will certainly change with time and the high system requirements for decoding such content can easily overload the processors on even the fastest notebooks. With NVIDIA's new VP2 hardware pretty much any new laptop will be able to handle playback of the latest high-definition H.264 video content.

The decoding of CABAC and CAVLC bitstreams (the two types of entropy encoding supported by H.264) greatly reduces the CPU requirements for decoding Blu-ray and HD-DVD content. Not all content uses H.264, however, and the CPU is still required for handling certain aspects of video playback like AACS decryption. Still, anyone that hopes to watch next-generation video content on a laptop will almost certainly need something like one of the new NVIDIA mobile GPUs for the time being.

NVIDIA provided the above information on expected CPU utilization during H.264 decoding. Their results are similar to what we measured, though a bit lower in CPU use. You can read more about the performance NVIDIA's VP2 offers in our latest PureVideo HD article.

While we are unable to present any concrete benchmarks at this time, NVIDIA is claiming up to a twofold increase in 3D performance within the same power profile relative to their last generation hardware. Twice as much performance would definitely be welcome, especially if the price doesn't change much, but the charts in NVIDIA's presentation show 3DMark05 and 06 as delivering the highest performance gains over GeForce Go 7400 and 7600 hardware. We're hopeful that we will see large gains in other games like Oblivion and some of the latest DirectX 9 titles, but until we can investigate the situation more we would take any claims of twofold performance gains with a grain of salt.

Noticeably absent in our discussion so far is any mention of a new high-end mobile graphics chip. It appears that for the time being NVIDIA's GeForce Go 7950 GTX will remain their fastest mobile GPU. (Or if you really want to go nuts, you can get a notebook with GeForce Go 7950 GTX SLI.) NVIDIA hasn't given us any official word, but they're certainly not standing still and we would expect to see some higher performance DirectX 10 mobile solution in the future. Whether that will be in a couple months or a half year or more from now is currently anyone's guess, but the GeForce Go 7950 GTX is more than six months old as is the 8800 GTS/GTX, so we're hopeful that a more powerful GeForce 8 series part will make its way into notebooks in the not-too-distant future. We also hope that NVIDIA will manage to incorporate the VP2 hardware into whatever enthusiast solutions they might launch in the future. As we just finished explaining, we feel such hardware makes a lot more sense on notebooks than on desktop computers (though ideally we would see it in both locations).

Post Your Comment

17 Comments

Not to nitpick, but the introduction comment about nvidia dominating ati at the midlevel is not right. The 7600 and X1600 Mobility were competitive with each other. The mobile version of the 7600 had only 8 pipelines, instead of the desktop version's 12. Consequently, depending on the game, one was faster than the other or vice versa. This was extensively benchmarked on notebookreview forums. Reply

That makes the 1600M a replacement for the 1500m, based on 8600GS and midrange ('performance'). The 5700 should be under 'mainstream'. The enthusiast or perhaps 'heavy cad' cards - the replacements for the 2500M and 3500M - are, just like the enthusiast gaming cards, not released and likely waiting for a die shrink. Reply

I'm going by the classification NVIDIA gave the various cards on one of the slides. Note that existing products are not included in the tables, only the new stuff, so outside of the mGPU parts (business) all of the cards are presumably DX10 capable. I would expect that the "enthusiast" 1600M is no faster than the other 8M parts listed, but there were no details on clock speeds or features of the workstation chips. I'm not sure any of the workstation parts listed are even shipping yet; most likely they are only being announced right now pending actual use in notebooks. I can check with NVIDIA for more details on those parts, though.... Reply

http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_42274.html">More details on mobile Quadro cards are available here. Basically, they are all DX10 parts, and the 1600M will probably be similar to the 8600M GT. Possibly it will be tuned such that the performance offered in workstation apps will be worthy of inclusion in the "enthusiast" range, although I'd say "workstation enthusiast" is a bit of an oxymoron. :) Reply

Thanks for the link. And yes, its the same for mobile workstation cards as for mobile gaming cards: the top performing ones ('enthusiast' or 'serious cad user' or just lets say 'expensive' :) ) have not been announced yet as the hole in the model numbers shows. They will likely need a die shrink to get the heat down for mobile use. So the 7xxx series still hold top place for mobile.

Plus of course the workstation models will be released a little after the gaming ones, due to the need for ISV certification. Reply

No idea, although since Mac doesn't use DirectX for graphics and may not really matter much. Those who want to use a MacBook Pro and run Boot Camp could potentially benefit if they run Windows Vista, but for now I wouldn't count on Apple using the new NVIDIA parts. I could of course be wrong, as I don't really stay up-to-date on Apple plans. Reply